Livefyre Announces Launch of Next Generation Conversation Platform, Secures $4.5 Million in Series B Round of Financing Led by Greycroft

Share Article

New platform with SocialSync™ technology brings a real-time, social-web experience to blogger and publisher sites

By working with the world’s leading publishers, we learned that they’re concerned with the same issue: tracking and connecting people who talk about their content in fragmented ways and external to their pages

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB)October 18, 2011

Livefyre, the industry leader in social commenting and real-time applications, has announced the release of its second-generation conversation platform along with a Series B round of financing. The $4.5M investment was led by Greycroft Partners and included digital media investors Cue Ball, HillsVen Group, and ff Venture Capital. This round of funding allows Livefyre to scale engineering and sales efforts, as well as accelerate development of its aggressive innovation roadmap.

Livefyre has grown rapidly since its public launch and now has an install base of over 14,000 sites ranging from individual bloggers to global publishers. Sites installing Livefyre see measurable results and on average realize a 25% increase in page views, 52% increase in comments per page and 20% increase in time on site. Recently launched sites include The Sun (one of Europe’s largest publications), BlogHer, Talking Points Memo, MIT Tech Review, TheNextWeb, with many more launching soon.

This financing round comes on the heels of Livefyre’s second-generation platform release, which introduces a series of powerful new social features called SocialSync™. SocialSync™ enables publishers to automatically pull in comments from Twitter and Facebook that are relevant to each of their content pages in real-time. By capturing the right conversations happening about their content off-site and bringing it back home, engagement on site content skyrockets as does search engine page rank—a capability exclusive to Livefyre.

“By working with the world’s leading publishers, we learned that they’re concerned with the same issue: tracking and connecting people who talk about their content in fragmented ways and external to their pages. SocialSync™ brings web conversations back to the content that inspired the conversation in the first place,” said Jordan Kretchmer, founder and CEO of Livefyre. “We have an extraordinary roadmap of innovative features and are excited to partner with Greycroft to turn them into reality and further help publishers nurture and grow their communities.”

SocialSync™ also enables sharing directly with friends in an industry first friend-tagging feature. Typing the ‘@’ symbol in Livefyre’s comment box allows users to tag any of their friends from Facebook and Twitter and invite them to join the conversation. These mentions simultaneously publish to the original conversation and on the appropriate social networks, which increases engagement and makes each publisher page more viral. “For the first time, users are able to initiate conversations with only the friends they choose, which greatly increases on-site activity and engagement” says Livefyre’s Director of Community Strategy, Jenna Langer.

This socially enhanced platform brings a fun, interactive experience to sites and encourages users to share posts with friends who are interested in the same content. Over time, communities begin to develop between like-minded contributors, increasing both the quality and quantity of comments while boosting core engagement metrics.

"We're delighted to be working with the incredible team at Livefyre," said Paul Bricault, Venture Partner at Greycroft. "Livefyre has already established impressive market traction with a growing client roster and they have demonstrated a broad understanding of what it takes for publishers and media companies to deeply engage users and cultivate an active online community."

Livefyre 2.0 was specifically designed to scale conversation and grow engaged, participatory communities. Key features include:

Share and capture conversations from the web, threaded and nested into current comment streams. Tag friends, “like” posts and share your replies with other social networks.

Intelligent moderation & community

Take control of spam by filtering comments from a centralized admin dashboard. Empower readers by enabling detailed user profiles, community flagging or naming multiple site moderators.

Powerful social applications

Livefyre’s platform enables publishers to create a wide variety of real-time applications that enhance community interaction and create new revenue-generating opportunities.

New users can get started with Livefyre’s second-generation platform today at http://www.livefyre.com. Existing customers will benefit from the new features immediately.

About Livefyre:

Livefyre is changing the way people interact with publisher content. Designed for the social web, Livefyre replaces static comment sections with dynamic, real-time conversations that empower users and help build hyper-active communities.

Livefyre was founded in 2009 and is based in San Francisco, California. For more information, visit http://www.livefyre.com.

About Greycroft:

Greycroft Partners is a venture capital partnership formed to invest in promising digital media companies, including both business and consumer-focused ventures. With offices in New York and Los Angeles, Greycroft leverages an extensive network of media and technology industry connections to help their portfolio companies gain visibility, build strategic relationships, and successfully bring their products to market.